iTunes Match

Apple has launched the missing piece of the puzzle in their wireless mobile music systems i.e. iTunes Match. Many of us are familiar with iTunes which enables the easy storage and delivery of songs over the Internet. With iTunes Match you have the freedom to buy any song just for $1. You can also store them on faraway computers called the cloud and retrieve them wirelessly on devices connected to the Internet. Today, this amazing software is on millions of computers, and many of us have iPods, iPhones or iPads that let us consume content bought through the iTunes online store. iTunes Match is a $24.99 per year service through which we can also upload our computer system songs to a personal locker in the cloud songs area.

Apple’s iTunes Match is basically more drawn towards downloading work and also sync finely with the existing song library or Apple devices or computer system.

With iTunes Match customers are able to scan and match tracks in their iTunes music library, along with tracks copied from CDs or other sources. Apple allows downloading up to 25,000 tracks in 256 kbps AAC file format. However, there are no signs of iTunes Match becoming accessible outside USA as it requires negotiations between Apple and each country’s music companies to resolve the copyright and ownership issues.

When iTunes Match was first unleashed upon developers over the summer, rumors began circulating that the service actually streamed music from the cloud, rather than downloading it as initially promised. While that made iTunes Match infinitely more interesting to many of us who weren’t looking to store a bunch of tracks on our iOS devices, the reality was something else — it’s more of a download buffer than a stream.

A bummer to be sure, but streaming our iTunes music library remains at the top of the wish list. Sure, we have plenty of other options for streaming music including Spotify, Rdio, MOG and others, but those require yet another subscription and at $10 per month, they’re definitely pricier than iTunes Match at $24.99 per year. Give us the option to stream tracks instead of downloading them, and we can see a lot more folks signing up.

Pros of iTunes Match

Easy synchronization.

Reliable music collection backup.

Access to music files encoded at a high bit rate.

Pretty economical.

Best cloud-based music services, if used on an iDevice.

Cons of iTunes Match

Can’t stream the music in the same way one can with Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player.

If you always feel comfortable using Apple’s devices and services then iTunes Match will be an alluring addition to them as it is cheap and keeps users’ music backed up and synced without the need to upload the entire collection.